Coffee Hour, Tuesday, 2/20 8am – 9am.
Stop by Boland Hall Gallery for coffee and take a look at this series of student photographs

Samantha Hagelbarger

Students in Professor Krista Svalbonas’s Digital Photography I class present their latest images. There are over twenty photographs on display by fifteen students from varying backgrounds covering a wide range of subjects.

Natalie Simms

Experimenting with shutter speed, aperture, depth of field, the rule of thirds, and light,  students from Professor Krista Svalbonas’s Digital Photography 1 class explored a particular theme or idea in these photographs Practicing different techniques has pushed students to identify certain technical and aesthetic characteristics of a photograph inside and outside of the classroom.  According to Svalbonas, “Digital Photography 1 introduces students to the fundamental terminology, concepts, methodologies, and techniques of digital photography. It focuses on the principles of composition, lighting, and visual story telling in photography.”

These photos show students’ perspectives on “how to tell a narrative story of the human experience” through digital photography, according to Professor Svalbonas. Svalbonas encouraged students to “photograph something that you feel strongly about, that interests you and you want to learn more about.”

For Dylan Eddinger ’19, Digital Photography 1 has challenged him to come out of his comfort zone as a photographer. As Eddinger reflects on taking Digital Photography 1, he now feels confident that “I can effectively create my own narrative in photographs.” Eddinger recalls one of the biggest obstacles he faced:photographing a series of photos that“involved something bigger than myself.”         

Eddinger chose to shoot his photographs at different locations throughout the city of Philadelphia. Prior to taking each photograph, he had a specific vision in mind. The man he photographed surrounded by American flags is a Philadelphia native and blues rocker who idolizes Bruce Springsteen.     One of Eddinger’s favorite images in the exhibition is from his long exposure series that contains the tagline for the fight against opioid addiction; “It only takes a little to lose a lot.” In a place where heroin takes over the streets, Eddinger found himself walking past “many struggling homeless people, and witnessed two corner deals” as he stood under the L train in Kensington Philadelphia at 2:45 am. As a result of witnessing what many people face in their daily lives, Eddinger believes that “there is hope for these people who have become addicted in our city.” Using photography, Digital Photography 1 had the opportunity to bring social and political issues in Philadelphia to light.

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“Photography can offer you a new way to look at your surroundings. It can surprise, inspire, excite and re-imagine the world around us.”    —Professor Krista Svalbonas

—Kelly Smith ’19
Gallery Exhibition Research Assistant

Blaise Knebels

Professor Steve Cope’s Drawing II student work featuring:
Rozana Almaddah, Ian Asaph, Shane Chapman, Angelica Christina, Francesca DeSapio, Matthew Erlandson, Kyndall Hawkins, Erin Kelly, Jessica Kerns, Zoe Malone, Regina Oliveri, Hunter Schmeusser, Alexa Sinatore, Andrea Warren, Anissa Wilson

Zoe Malone

Professor Steve Cope’s Drawing II course focuses on enhancing students’ drawing skills. The first half of the semester focuses on sizeable still life drawings. These drawings pay close attention to form, light and shadows, and values of light and dark. Shading within these still life drawings pays attention to the intricate folding of fabric, the features of sculpted heads and texture and shape of pottery vessels. For homework assignments, Professor Cope gives the students a word to interpret in any way that the student wants. For example, one word was “cast.” The drawings produced varied from a fisherman casting, to a cast at a closing of a show. The broad interpretations of the word demonstrate each student’s personality and interests.  Some other homework assignment words were: post, feat, multiple, turn, wearily and swanky.

Gabriella Youshock ’20
Gallery Exhibition Research Assistant

Angelica Christina

Erin Kelly  “Swanky”

Jessica Kerns

Within this illustration, a model shifts her head to the left to reveal scenery in the background. The dark and dense background suggests to the viewer that nighttime is swiftly approaching. This is illustrated by the light behind the figure. This drawing was done in pencil, blurring the lines between fiction and reality. This obscuring plays a crucial role in creating feelings of uncertainty, or uneasiness.
– Gabriella Youshock

11/9/17 Artist Talk – Ben Schwab

 
Everything Is Different, But Still The Same, Oil on canvas, 88 x 138 inches, 2017

Getting Here From There

            New York artist Ben Schwab grapples with the theme of “getting here from there” in his collection of cityscape paintings. In this gallery, viewers witness how Schwab’s work questions what he calls our “natural tendencies” as he tries to “make the unobservable, or unseen, more visible.” At first glance, each image appears to be bordering abstraction.  However, the negative space alongside minimal use of color compels the viewer to take a closer look at the details that reveal deteriorating cites such as Damascus and Aleppo.

            Getting Here From There is inspired by Schwab’s interest in video footage collected by drones. Schwab’s “honest sense of curiosity,” as he calls it, motivates him to incorporate images of decaying cities into large scale paintings. In his artistic process, Schwab manipulates and layers multiple screenshots through Photoshop to create one image. Further, the spaces that Schwab works with might appear to be equally familiar as they are unfamiliar to some viewers. Rather than presenting a single perspective in his paintings, Schwab forces viewers to step out of their comfort zones and look at spaces they most likely haven’t seen before. As a result, the nature of “getting here from there” ultimately encourages viewers to strengthen their ability to connect with a place when presented with an image depicting an unfamiliar space.

~ Kelly Smith ‘19
Gallery Exhibition Research Assistant

Transposition Of Immensity, Oil on canvas, 84 x 76 inches, 2016

In this exhibition, alumni artists Kate Ambrose and Julia Newell prioritize the viewer’s emotional and sensory responses to their works. Both artists understand their works as vehicles of self-recognition, reflection, revelation, and remembrance.

In her exploration of abstract expressionism, Ambrose finds her ever-changing artistic approach calling forward the viewer’s subconscious. Attempting to tap into that unfiltered mindset, “evoking raw conversation,” Ambrose says, “is what [she] lives for.” Her work battles with spontaneity and intent, candidly coaxing us to self-examine with a childlike innocence.

Newell similarly places the viewer in control, offering works she says are “fuel[ed by] advocacy to help those who have suffered through mental illnesses.” Her organic forms express seemingly familiar narratives that invite viewers’ interaction. Newell understands painting, she says, as “simply a time to zone out and create.” Her works appear as moments to temporarily forget—or remember and reflect.

~ Nick Crouse, ‘19
Gallery Exhibition Research Assistant

I’m in the Wrong Film is a consideration of our troubled relationship to the marginal places that exist in the national landscape. The title of the series is a colloquialism used to indicate a speaker’s disorientation in regard to physical surroundings that have taken on a disconcerting, fictitious quality. In this series of staged and performative photographs, the experience of individual dislocation the phrase describes is applied more broadly, in articulating the collective loss of identity that permeates the rural and post-industrial landscape of America.

Presented as a constellation of narrative fragments, each photograph manifests the shared psychology between a transient character and constructed environments suggestive of Middle America. The character, wandering with alternating senses of desire and reticent detachment amid his surroundings, is an extension of a place no longer able to sustain itself. The photographs present transitory moments, in which the agency of the character is called into question, arrested by the stillness of the photograph. His impotence and perpetual immobility mirror the circumstance of the small town, which, after being used politically, socially, and aesthetically in defining a national image and identity, is now marked by the stasis of economic decline. Whether by accepting and naturalizing their erasure or attempting to salvage viability through a nostalgic commodification of their past, these communities succumb to an estrangement from their own history and sense of themselves.

A corollary to this rupture can be found in the physical construction of the photographic tableau. The character’s performances are recorded in-studio and are later inserted into landscapes imagined out of multiple photographic fragments. Referencing the mechanics of the theater and silent film, wherein a décor foregrounds the actor’s performance, the composited backdrops provide a visual context for the performances while also establishing a physical and psychological separation. At times, these virtual stages reveal their artifice and begin to falter and collapse upon the character. This implicates not only the narrative content, but also the materiality of the photograph and fallibility of its construction as synchronous sources of the character’s sense of being “in the wrong film.”

The social narrative of the small town, the lack of agency in the character’s performance, and the faltering construction of the image compound upon one another in describing both the instinctive desire and the relative absurdity in attempting to recover a sense of belonging in a time of dislocation.

Gallery Lecture
Thursday, September 28, 11am – 12pm.
Boland Hall Gallery, Saint Joseph’s University

Ryan Coffman, MPH, CHES, CTTS-M, Tobacco Policy and Control Program Manager for the Philadelphia Department of Public Health will come to Saint Joseph’s University to speak to students about “The Tobacco Project” and the Health Department’s initiatives to reduce tobacco addiction especially among Philadelphia youth.  He joins SJU art history professor, Dr. Emily Hage who will speak about art as a means for social change.

The lecture begins at 11am in Boland Hall.  Following the lecture, visitors can view the artwork in the gallery while enjoying a light lunch.  This event is free and open to the public.